Shira Spector’s artwork has been exhibited in Montreal and Toronto, and her illustrations featured on the covers of Fireweed, Canadian Women’s Studies, Text: The Museum for Textiles Newsletter, and In Recovery by Nora Jacobson. Her clients include: Vanderbilt Press, Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, My Family Matters: Schools Project (Sherbourne Health Centre, The 519, EGALE, Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People), and Alternative Grounds Coffee House & Roastery. Her writing is published in Confessions of the Other Mother Edited by Harlyn Aisley, and Who’s Your Daddy? Edited by Rachel Epstein (due spring 2009.)
Born at the tail end of the sixties, Shira Spector was surrounded by enough floral patterned, love and chaos to influence her aesthetic for the rest of her life. She grew up in Montreal-located the city’s core by age eleven to join a children’s theatre troupe, and spent many of her teen years writing poetry on her clothes. Inevitably, she attended art school and obtained a BFA (with distinction in Fibres) from Concordia University. Avoiding jobs that might completely suck the life from her, work has taken her inside the secret worlds of belly dancers, kids with disabilities, street youth and rock stars. She creates and facilitates arts based programs for children of all ages and abilities for various agencies including The Latcham Gallery and Learning Through the Arts.
Fortified by all things luminous and outrageous, Shira loves taking risks, and accepts defying the mundane as her personal mission in life.
